Buying followers is the ‘black hat’ technique of social channels. But rather than chastise and condemn those that do with the many reasons it’s a bad idea, I thought I would conduct an experiment to buy some followers myself to find out first hand the benefits/downsides.

Whether you’re a fledgling social user or a seasoned community manager trying to improve engagement; one of the main indicators that you are succeeding is getting new followers (or at least that is what your boss thinks).

The reaction to my Clearing Live project has really taken me by surprise. While I obviously thought it was something worth doing, it appears that is has attracted quite a lot of attention externally as well.

Possibly because it’s something different and – more importantly – incredibly cost-effective.

In addition to getting shortlisted for a fair few awards and mentioned here and there, it has also been prominently featured in an article for CIPR’s Influence magazine.

‘They’ say that organisations should treat Twitter like a ringing phone: you wouldn’t leave the phone ringing off the hook, you would answer it.

I get the adage – if someone is going through the effort to communicate with you, you should engage with them.

But a ringing phone is (usually) anonymous. Until we answer it, we don’t know who is on the other end. Twitter, on the other hand, gives us some (if not all) the information we need to ascertain whether we need to bother replying.

Twitter is the digital equivalent of a peep-hole. We get a glimpse of who is there, but not the whole story.

This blog post will inevitably be the first of many when it comes to the art of responding on social channels. Different channels can have different approaches. And there are so many different situations that you could write a book (indeed many have).

But a recent personal encounter with some bad responding made me want to start kicking things off.

Enhancing images in Photoshop is a bit like dancing – there is more than one way to do it, once you’ve found a method you like you usually stick with it forever, and although you often feel what you do looks good… others may not agree.

WARNING: This is a dry post. Like Sahara dry. Don’t let the exciting picture with a very tenuous link (speed) fool you. This is about the un-shiny side of the wondrous internet – it’s about *gulp*... Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)!

So let’s get through this quickly.

AMP. What is it? Well, it could be something that in the future makes your page shoot up the rankings if you’re ready for it, and shoot down the rankings if you’re not.